


A Soft Spot for Dweebs

by wneleh



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e10 The Bridge, F/M, Gen, Just slightly het in places
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/pseuds/wneleh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melinda May has always had a soft spot for dweebs.  Set immediately after the mid-season-one cliffhanger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Soft Spot for Dweebs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hikaru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikaru/gifts).



> For Hikaru, who wanted backstory for May.

It was autumn 1983. Some Wednesday evening, it must have been, because you were wearing your ROTC uniform. Your intro-level CS class was working its first big project of the year, so it must have been October.

Yeah, it must have been October, 1983, some random Wednesday, and I’d seen you heading into the CS building, so I’d ducked into the department lounge and gotten you a coffee, prepped just the way I’d seen you do it in the cafeteria. 

In the lab, all the VT100s were occupied, and you were one of a dozen students sitting against the wall in the hallway right outside, waiting for the proctor to kick the current shift off. It’d be like this all night, seventeen-, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old Freshmen and Sophomores trying to eek out as many compiles on that old DEC mainframe as they could during their measly half-hour turns.

I slide down the wall next to you and set the coffee between us. “I thought you finished the program the day it was assigned, before it got too crazy in here.”

“Yes, of course I did,” you say, and I see that, in your lap, you have a printout you’re marking up. You gesture across the hall, to where a desperate-looking 100-lb. kid in a plaid shirt and a bowl haircut is staring at us. “I’m not doing anyone’s homework for them, but I can cut out a few compile cycles.”

You circle something near the bottom of the page with a flourish and slide the paper across the hall to bowl-cut. “Next!” you say, and now a guy who looks like a linebacker is handing you his code. You grimace, hand it back. “Format it, make sure you have semicolons where you need them, then compile. THEN come talk to me.”

“But I need to write an English paper tonight!” he whines.

“Guess you’re doing it here,” you say, taking a sip of the coffee.

“You’re doing my job,” I say. “They pay upperclassmen to help in here. We take turns all night.”

“I know,” you say. “It’s just…” and you gesture at the room, the kids swearing at their screens, the growing crowd here in the hallway. 

“You have a soft spot for dweebs,” I say. 

“Maybe.”

“So I have a chance?” It was 1983, you could say things like that, even if you were a TA, at least if you were an undergrad yourself, and your target had a solid A.

You take another sip of coffee. “Not that soft a spot,” you say.

\- - - - -

It’s 2013, also October, and I think I might be a zombie. 

“Tell us about the day after you died.” 

Melinda, where are you?

\- - - - -

That coffee on the floor of Intro to Pascal (or whatever the course was called) – do you remember it? You started dating looked-like-a-linebacker a few weeks later, and I decided I might have a shot myself if I got buff, so I started working out. Buff proved elusive, but I discovered I could run a decent 5K, hold my own sparring my weight class, swim until I ran out of water and then some. 

Eight months after that coffee, I did my first triathlon. I think you knew I was competing, I don’t think you ever knew why. Anyway, thank you. 

\- - - - -

It’s 1993 and things have fallen apart. There are bodies on the ground. Twisted, unmoving. There’s a giant hole we’re going to have to try to pass off as a sinkhole. Again. There’s a baby, for God’s sake. Little Baby Skye, I know now. And you’re in the middle of it all, holding the baby like it’s poisonous.

Clint Barton, not much more than a kid himself yet, is suddenly at my elbow. “Someone handed the baby to MELINDA?” he says, and he’s past me and he’s snatched Skye from you and cleared out. And I don’t know if this is forgivable or not, but I don’t give them a second thought, not for a while.

You’d only been with S.H.I.E.L.D. a few months, and I was afraid this is going to chase you away. Not back into the Air Force, we had it on good authority that they were as happy to see you go as you were to leave. But there were rumors of offers from both Delta and United.

A different organization would have had you spending the next three hours being debriefed. Instead, I get you to the nearest diner and order a pot of coffee. 

“You okay?” I ask. “I can’t tell.”

You look at me like I’m stupid. “That was the first real fight I’ve ever been in, Phil. And we won.”

Maybe she didn’t know. “People died.”

“Dangerous people died. Better people die every day.”

True. “You saved their baby.”

“Of course I saved their baby.”

“For that you get pie,” I say. So we have pie with our coffee. Coffee and apple pie.

\- - - - -

“Tell us about the day after you died.” 

We haven’t had coffee since - since. Even on the plane. 

\- - - - - 

It’s 2008, I don’t remember the time of year. We’re in Malibu, so it doesn’t really matter. Fury wants Tony Stark brought into the fold. Mr. Stark wants nothing to do with any of us. Things would have gone down very differently for Stark if S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn’t been there, if Virginia Potts and I hadn’t been on the same page, but I doubt Tony Stark knows, or cares, about the part anyone but himself has played. 

By the time I call you in, there’s nothing to do but give Stark an alibi, something to deflect attention and keep the world’s most dangerous people from trying to kill him. You’ve worked all night helping to put it together; now we just need Mr. Stark to buy in. “Iron Man will be his body guard,” I explain.

“It won’t work,” you say. 

“Because the guy’s a megalomaniac?”

“No, a megalomaniac wouldn’t mind the world thinking he’s Iron Man’s boss,” you say. “If all he wanted was power – well, there’s power for you.”

I wait for you to continue, but you don’t say anything else. When you stop talking, I can never tell – still can never tell – whether you think we’re done, or if you’re waiting for me to come up with something on my own, or if you’re working through something yourself.

Anyway, two hours later Stark proves you were right. “How’d you know?” I ask you.

You shrug. “He’s a dweeb.”

\- - - - -

It’s 2011, Bahrain, midnight. For years I’ve thought you were part iron yourself, so maybe that’s why I don’t have the right words, don’t know what to say when you walk out of that compound. Like in 1993, you’re holding a young child. A little boy, this time maybe three years old, wearing Star Wars footie pajamas. The son of one of the “Gifted Individual”’s followers, I don’t think I ever found out his mother’s name. I don’t see the hostage, or our people, anywhere.

I try to take him from you and you won’t let him go. I don’t remember who we finally hand the child off to. 

A diner, or the local equivalent, is out of the question, so we just walk. I tell you that you’re going to have to tell someone what happened in there, so it might as well be me, and you say, no, anyone BUT me.

I say I trust you. You say I shouldn’t.

I say, whatever you’re feeling, it’ll fade. You say you’re afraid I’m right. 

I say that you’d have to live with whatever happened. That I know you can. You say nothing.

Star Wars footie pajamas. 

\- - - - -

I text you a few months later, from Arizona, on the run. Please, I type. You don't respond.

\- - - - -

It’s October 2013 and I shouldn’t be so scared. This isn’t my first kidnapping. 

But of course I’m not afraid of what Centipede will do to me, I’m afraid of what they’ll learn from me, through me. And of what they’ll do with that knowledge. 

Or am I more afraid of simply learning the truth myself?

It would have been so much better coming from you, over coffee, and maybe pie.

I know you’ll come. And then you’ll take pity on me, tell me the truth I know you know.

Any minute now.

If I’m not already dead in your eyes...

No, you’ll take pity on me. You'll get me out, and then we'll talk, no matter Fury’s orders. You have a soft spot for hopeless people in distress. A soft spot for dweebs.

**Author's Note:**

> Hikaru's request, placed after the third episode I think, read: _I really really want to see backstory for May. They hint at it, what with her being "The Calvary" and all and being awesome, but I'd love to see some fannish theories on just what she got up to before she took her desk job. OR maybe one of those stories where everyone's heard a different rumor about her exploits, and they're all sharing them with each other. I'm sure even SHIELD gossips about missions, no matter how secret they are._
> 
> If you've been watching the show, you realize that Hikaru has described 01x09 "Repairs". Not wanting to violate extant canon, or be Jossed before January is through, I decided I'd better stay out of May's head, and landed in Phil Coulson's. Which, at the end of 01x10 "The Bridge", is a pretty messy place.


End file.
